The background description provided herein is for the purpose of generally presenting the context of the disclosure. Work of the presently named inventors, to the extent it is described in this background section, as well as aspects of the description that may not otherwise qualify as prior art at the time of filing, are neither expressly nor impliedly admitted as prior art against the present disclosure.
Network devices such as network switches, routers, edge devices, and the like often employ store and forward architectures in which received packets are queued in memory in the network device—for example, but not only, for scheduling—for subsequent transmission from the network device. Such network devices typically perform traffic “shaping” by storing packets corresponding to different subscribers, or to packets having different priorities, in separate queues, and independently controlling transmission of packets stored in each of the queues. With growing numbers of subscribers and growing numbers of services offered to subscribers, such network devices need to support, for example, flexible provision and assignment of queues to switch ports.